If your business reimburses employees for out-of-pocket expenses (yourself included), you need a process to track and record those costs and make timely, accurate payments. But for many people, expense report filing ranks somewhere between going to the dentist and doing your taxes.
Several Web-based services are out to ease the pain with easy-to-use, low-cost systems that make the expense reporting process as quick and easy as possible for small business owners. Choices include Expensify, Concur Breeze and ExpensePoint.
Concur Breeze (concurbreeze.com) is the small-business version of the online expense-management service that Concur has been offering bigger businesses since the 1990s. It’s an all-in-one gig that lets you manage your entire business-expense process online.
Expensify (expensify.com), which defines itself as “Expense reports that don’t suck,” can completely eliminate paper. For example, the system can import expense info directly from your credit card accounts (via nightly updates).
You can also import expenses via text message (to log cash outlays, for example), e-mail your receipts or use your app-equipped smart phone to record expenses on the go. You can download the Expensify app at the Intuit Workplace, Google Apps Marketplace and Salesforce AppExchange.
You can even snap a picture of receipts with your camera phone and send that to your file. Once all of your info is there, you can quickly assemble the expenses on the website. All of your imported, uploaded and logged business expenses are stored digitally and available 24/7. Working offline? Reports can also be saved as PDFs for review. Or to conduct a deeper dive into the numbers you can export all expenses into Excel to develop metrics for growth, monitor overall spending and build forecasts.
As you receive a new expense report, export it to QuickBooks (online or desktop versions) and attach it to a corresponding employee account. Expensify displays a list of accounts and lets you choose which employee submitted the report for reimbursement. With all expenses attached to an account in QuickBooks, pick the account to pay from and reimburse all work through QuickBooks. Simply select the employee or account to compensate and click “Write Check.”
Most Web-based systems also let you reimburse employees or contractors online, directly to their bank accounts. And you can use the Expensify application in SalesForce to link expenses directly to customer accounts.
Submitting reports is free with both Concur Breeze and Expensify. But there’s a monthly fee to use the approval and reimbursement features of around $5 for each unique report submitter, with the first two free.
Daniel Kehrer can be reached at
editor@business.com.
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